


Radio Bitty

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Adulting, Future Fic, M/M, Radio, Sketch Fic, background shitty/lardo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 17:46:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7371532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Alicia who says, "You know, Eric, you have a voice for radio."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radio Bitty

**Author's Note:**

> Just a sketchfic, especially near the beginning, but enough love went in that I want to archive it nicely. Many thanks to staranise for the encouragement, and celeloriel for plying me with details about radio careers. All liberties taken are my own darned fault.

I can feel a ramble coming on, so let's just dive into the middle and hope for the best. Whee!

Bitty would make a project out of learning every type of savory pie and pastry on the planet, from tourtières and Cornish pasties to samosas to sfeehas to xian bing. Sure, he loves fruit fillings, but he's adaptable and motivated, and it makes for a _great_ vlog series. He's got twenty new types of flour in his pantry, and plans his trips to Boston around the locations and business hours of his favourite specialty grocers. And then, once he's mastered the basics, can you imagine the fusion dishes? Go west, young chickpea! Char siu pot pie, anyone? He'll be occupied for years.

The thing is, he is _not_ Jack's nutritionist's mortal enemy. He knows how much this matters. In fact, he probably appears deferentially in her office, shortly after moving to Providence: "Hi. I'm Bitty. Jack's boyfriend? I'm a baker. I don't want to be your mortal enemy."

He does make his point about being a baker by leaving her an exquisite half-sized peach pie. Yup. Point made, Bits.

But the nutritionist (who's this big-boned, big-voiced lady with a black topknot half the size of her head; let's call her Measha), looks at the polite, Southern boy sitting up straight in the seat across from her, knowing something about what he's been through to get there, and says, "Babydoll, you're not my enemy. We're going to be best friends."

And she proceeds to tell him about Jack. Jack's body, that is: its hourly demands, fuel versus nutrients, summer versus the horrors of playoff season, muscle and bone and brain and pleasure and necessity. She gives him a little pile of books to read, and tells him he can skip the science parts if he wants. (He kinda wants, but he _tries_ , bless him, and pesters Ransom with questions for about a week before tabling it for the time being.) _Then_ , oh man. The honour bestowed. She lets him see her three-ring binders. He's not allowed to remove them from the building, but she doesn't mind if he sits there and flips through them and takes pictures of her meal plans and annotated recipes with his tablet.

Bitty's not Jack's keeper. He's not going to start packing him daily bag lunches with the calorie counts sharpied on the front any time soon. But feeding people is how he loves, and by God, he's going to love this man expertly.

So he's in the building a lot, between that and his friendship with the PR and media offices, who always joke that they should just hire him already. "Oh hell no," Bitty always says. "I can love Jack or spin him, but not both." He's got a job waiting tables at a local café-pub, which pretty much everyone who knows him boggles at ("Why on earth do they have you out _front_??!"), but, besides the fact that there were no openings in the kitchen, Bitty is adamant that it's a good thing, experiencing this side of the food industry first-hand, and there's no denying he's good at it, with his poise and sunny manners. On slow days, Julio teaches him how to mix drinks. He gets hit on _all the time_ , by young men and old ladies and everyone in between.

Jack is frankly weirded out by Bitty's commitment to this scrappy gig, his seriousness about tracking his finances with his little cluster of phone apps, and his stout refusal to let Jack give him a debit card attached to Jack's bank account. Jack is trying his best to deal with this like a non-whiny adult. It isn't that Bitty is shy of taking Jack's money, per se. Frankly, most of the time he thinks he could spend it more effectively than Jack, whose last episode of frivolity occurred eight months ago, when he bought himself a cool set of fishing lures. Someday, their finances will be a joint affair. Meanwhile, Bitty's got a skill set (working title "adulting") to prove—not to Jack, or his parents, or anyone but himself.

Then a bunch of the Falc geeks are having lunch one day, and it's Isaac's birthday so Bitty has joined them with a giant tin of apple caramel turnovers, because the media office has no instructions to eat more protein and Bitty needs his outlets, okay? Besides, in Bitty's mind, he owes them forever. 

Bitty's trying to coax Measha to guest star on his vlog. "I want a series about feeding my athlete!" 

"Sure, punkin, you can film my blood-curdling scream when I discover your subterranean vault of butter." 

Hallie the social media intern says, "Dude, I want that for _our_ vlog." 

Everybody starts exclaiming at once.

They wind up cutting a ten minute segment and titling it "How to Feed Your Falconer." The Falcs' site bills it as the epic, to-the-death battle between the stern health professional and her star player's Southern baker boyfriend, but it's mostly a hilarious, but friendly and surprisingly informative interview, with Bitty casting himself as Measha's willing student. They shoot in Measha's office and Bitty's kitchen, with a few clips of the Falconers shoveling food in their faces, then doing their thing on the ice or in the weight room. There's a dream sequence in the middle featuring Evil Bitty, who appears in front of a befuddled-looking Jack with a seductive "Hi, honey," carrying a chocolate tart while wearing booty shorts and a tank top with a bunny appliqued on the front. 

It goes a little bit viral, mostly for that last bit. People want it to be a regular thing. And then the hits quintuple after the blooper reel goes up, because there's nothing more enchanting than stoic Jack Zimmermann putting his head down on the table, unable to quash his giggle fit, as they try to film his reaction to evil booty Bitty. There's also an extra minute of Bitty perched on Jack's lap, trying to tempt him with a loaded fork, and Jack's hands come up around Bitty's waist automatically, and he deadpans to someone off camera, "Wait, I'm supposed to be interested in the _pie_ , right now?" You can hear the crew cracking up in the background.

So they make a few more, maybe four installments in total. 

Bitty's clearly built for this kind of thing. But he needs a sustainable, living-wageable niche, and the Falcs don't really have one for him.

People tell Bitty all the time in his comment sections that he should host a real cooking show. No way in hell: the food waste on those sets would drive him bananas. Other people, usually those he has fed, beg him to open a bakery, for the good of humanity! But he sincerely doubts he'd get much joy out of that particular breed of entrepreneurship; running a bakery is exhausting and thankless. Plus, what happens if Jack gets traded to the West Coast in five years? He could maybe see himself as the pastry chef for someone else's gastropub serving upscale comfort food, or at an adorable café like the Duck and Bunny down on Wickenden Street, but, he's not sure.

It's Alicia who says, "You know, Eric, you have a voice for radio." 

Oh jeez, he does: lively and expressive, but honey-warm. 

Bitty, who has just finished telling the story of the stray kittens he and Julio found under the azalea bushes by the parking lot behind the café, blinks at her and goes a little pink. 

Bob's eyebrows go up thoughtfully. "Ooh," he says.

Jack reaches over and pokes Bitty in the side of the head, teasing him out of his bemused expression. "I'd listen," says Jack, then pouts when everybody rolls their eyes.

On the plane home from Montreal, Jack says, "Oh, hey, this is about the history of sugar, you want an earbud?" Bitty tucks away his magazine, closes his eyes, and listens to Jack's podcast. Gets lost in the story, but afterward thinks about the structure and flow of it, admires the chatty camaraderie. And huh. Maybe. He can see himself there. Well, not on _Backstory_ there, but something like that. Next time he's baking in his kitchen, he flips on NPR.

He rolls the idea around. Rewatches a bunch of his own vlogs, paying more attention to the sound of his voice than he ever did before. Like most people, he doesn't love listening to recordings of himself, because his mellow tenor is so much lighter and thinner than what he hears when he speaks. But he figures it isn't bad. He records himself with his headset and no video, instructions for making buttermilk scones, and, after some consideration, sends it to Lardo. 

Lardo surprises him by making the scones. She writes back and tells him that his voice is a dream, but he said "ah" or "let's see" nine times, and needs to edit the pacing because of the lack of visuals. She points out where she wanted more, or less, description. She also mentions he might as well buy a pop filter if he's doing this, since they're only twenty bucks and it's easier than learning how to avoid popping his "p"s. Bitty thinks about that, then spends five hours teaching himself how to speak pristinely into the cheapest filterless mike in the house.

He keeps on working at the café. Keeps playing around with his mike. Caves and buys a better one. Podcasts and news streams start hobnobbing with the Beyoncé albums on his iPhone. He asks Georgia if he can hang out in the announcers' booth during a Falcs game. He even Skypes, shyer than he's been in a long time, with Alicia, when Jack's not around.

Six months later, Bitty submits internship applications to radio stations in RI and MA. He includes "How to Feed Your Falconer" (part three; no booty shorts), a sample interview, and a scripted feature he produced by himself, in a single, slickly edited file. Isaac from PR proofs his cover letter. He lands a gig at WBUR. Boston.

For Bitty, who has so much experience with freelance and hobbyist media, it's a weird step into the corporate world. Assignments he didn't choose, and deadlines in deadly earnest, no such thing as a late submission for partial credit. On the plus side, health insurance.

What follow are some of the most frustrating and valuable years of his life. Hard because he and Jack had hoped they were finished with the mismatched schedules and obnoxious commutes, but good because Bitty loves this work, and can feel himself stretching into adulthood, beginning, in slow increments, to inhabit it on his own terms, in a way that feels new and nerve-racking and promising. 

He takes up a sort of quarter residency in Shitty and Lardo's spare room, pays one of their utility bills in lieu of rent, and it works out well because they're on the same Green Line route as the radio office, and a few stops after that it's an easy jog to South Station. Jack, to his credit, really does take this development like a trooper: he's so proud of Bitty he could burst.

The reinforcement of their relationship with Shits and Lardo is an added bonus. They're growing up, too, in their own ways, at a rapid clip, and it's one thing to promise, "Friends for life!" at graduation, but it's another thing entirely to sustain those connections, to grow them and feed them and weather their transformations, through moves and new social circles and depression and career changes and so much self-discovery that college sometimes feels like a lifetime ago.

Shitty drags them off to see the Alloy Orchestra at Coolidge Corner, keeps the Harvard rink's free skate hours posted on the fridge, and subscribes to a farm share and then panics and makes Bitty help him deal with the horrifying influx of vegetables while Bitty complains he's a baker, not a cook, "but yes I will save you from the okra, good Lord, it doesn't bite, it just oozes."

And sometimes Jack comes to visit them in Boston, and they sit outside on the unpainted, sun-and-rain-warped balcony that looks like it might collapse under Jack's weight alone, and drink craft beer and talk about intersectional feminism, and complain about their jobs, and Lardo tells them about her latest art project, which is inspired by quantum coherence exploitation in purple non-sulfur bacteria.

And more nights than not, Bitty takes the train back to Providence, propels his weary bones into bed with Jack, koalas himself around him and kisses his shoulders and cheek and lips, works his boxers down over his ass and makes love to him by the glow of the bedside clock.

"How are you?" he asks, often. "For me, it's hard, but worth it. How is it for you?" He makes sure to ask when there's really time to answer; days when he gets home first and has a chicken roasting in the oven, he waits for Jack on the couch, opens his arms and says, "Come snuggle with me until dinner's ready." Jack flops down and buries his nose in Bitty's stomach, demanding petting, and affirms, "Hard, but worth it. I'm still so in love with you."

For Bitty's birthday, Jack soundproofs their guest closet and buys a top-of-the-line portable recording system. Bitty shakes his head and hugs his boyfriend hard.

He's graduated to a regular segment on a New England arts and culture hour, and a nice amount of subbing for other Boston hosts, when he finally hits the jackpot. Rhode Island Public Radio gets a new budget, and Bitty sends them a bumbleberry pie along with the show proposal he's had in his back pocket for years. Graciously, RIPR accepts both.

It takes a village. RIPR has been struggling for years, underfunded and upstaged by the behemoth transmitters of Boston and New York. But the Cup-winning Providence Falconers have brought tourism to town, and tourism has brought jobs, and the state, with its already-hopping list of music and arts festivals, and its big, beautiful arena, has never been more vibrant.

Bitty's show is about food, what else? He films many of his interviews and throws the footage up on Youtube, as radio hosts do these days, and he's got a huge range of guests, from chefs to food chemists to grandmothers, Olympic nutritionists from around the globe, his old thesis advisor after her book comes out, and the grumpy boulanger he apprenticed with in Aix during a six-week summer exchange back in 2016, for a series on food and education. With his American Studies degree, he digs into historical questions, etymology, diaspora. There's also a listener Q & A, researched and co-hosted by a beaming, bubbly CIA grad named Cho with an unexpectedly deep, gorgeous, cabaret lounge alto. 

It's not long before they're syndicated nationally. And if Jack moves, well, now Bitty can record anywhere. 

He still keeps up his old Samwell vlog, and reads his mama's Pinterest like it's the news. 

And his first interviewee? "I got so much advice about this," Bitty tells his listeners. "'For your debut, go big. Get a celebrity guest to lure 'em in.' Well, I can tell you I've got someone pretty darned fancy lined up for next week, and I'll announce that in a little while. But for episode one of my dream job here on NPR, there was never any question. I'd like to introduce y'all to the finest baker I've ever found in all my travels, and the person who taught me how to shape a pie crust in the first place. I've known her all my life as Moo Maw."  



End file.
